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by Adam Pash

If you've followed my introduction to Mouse-less Firefox or Gina's excellent guide to Firefox Quick Searches, you should know by now that we at Lifehacker prefer to use the keyboard as often as possible to get us what we want while browsing with the 'Fox.

But I've always been a little disappointed with the lack of good (or any) shortcuts for a lot of the different settings dialogs available in Firefox, whether we're talking Options, Extensions, or Bookmarks. Luckily, after spending a little time with the Firefox DOM Inspector and adding a few easy-to-remember bookmark keywords, we're dishing out eight quick access shortcuts to your most-used Firefox settings dialogs.

Firefox's DOM Inspector (installed with the Web Developer tools) allows you to check out the URL of any Firefox window, even those that aren't actually used for web browsing. The URLs of these windows generally begin like so: chrome://.... By getting the chrome URLs of some of Firefox's most-used dialog windows, we can bookmark them like any other URL, making quick work of accessing, for example, the Options menu with a couple of keystrokes. Additionally, the bookmarks will open inside of Firefox, like any other URL would.

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To make things as simple as possible, I've made these quick access bookmarks available for download.

From the Bookmarks Manager File menu, choose Import. Then select
Import Bookmarks from File.
Browse to and open the file you just saved.

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Now that you've got the "Lifehacker Quick Access Firefox Settings" folder in your Bookmarks, you can access some of your oft-used Firefox settings and managers with a few easy keystrokes in the location bar. For example, type ext in your browser to quickly access your Extensions.

Here is the full list of shortcuts included in this file:

Lifehacker Quick Access Firefox Settings

Bookmarks Manager

Type "bm" to access the Firefox Bookmarks Manager. Granted, Ctrl+B will open the Bookmarks sidebar, but it doesn't allow the full Bookmarks Manager functionality.

Close Tab/Window

Type "x" to close a tab, or if no tabs are open, to close the window. This one doesn't exactly deal with settings, but it's too cool to pass up.

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Of course, I'm sure that there are a lot more chrome URLs that could make useful shortcuts under the right circumstances. Anyone out there have any suggestions for other cool chrome URLs, or maybe you've got even better shortcuts for accessing some of these Firefox settings? Let us know in the comments, or send an email to tips at lifehacker.com and we'll get a comment invite your way.